Legal Protection of the Web Page as a Database

Abstract

Nowadays the Web page is one of the most common medium used by people, institutions, and companies to promote themselves, to share knowledge, and to get through to every body in every part of the world. In spite of that, the Web page does not entitle one to a specific legal protection and because of this, every investment of time and money that stays off-stage is not protected by an unlawfully used. Seeing that no country in the world has a specific legislation on this issue in this chapter, we develop a theory that wants to give legal protection to Web pages using laws and treatment that are just present. In particular, we have developed a theory that considers Web pages as a database, so extends a database’s legal protection to Web pages. We start to analyze each component of a database and to find them in a Web page so that we can compare those juridical goods. After that, we analyze present legislation concerning databases and in particular, World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treatments and European Directive 96/92/CE, which we consider as the better legislation in this field. In the end, we line future trends that seem to appreciate and apply our theory.

Keywords: web page, copyright, database, intellectual property, ip